Fot.Margarete Redl von Peinen.
The 3rd KRoki Contemporary Dance Festival will open on Sunday, 17 May 2015 (7:15 pm, Małopolski Ogród Sztuki, ul. Rajska 12) with a piece by legendary German dancer and choreographer Susanne Linke. The production is clearly based on two dancers who come from two different but equally developed dance traditions. Susanne Linke impersonates the modern dance idea better than any other dancer in Germany ? from Mary Wigman to Folkwangschule Essen and the dance theatre. Koffi Kôkô ? known to Polish audiences for his performance at Wrocław’s Brave Festival 2014 ? draws inspiration from sophisticated rituals of passage in West African cultures. Both of them use their bodies as a unique library containing the knowledge of respective cultures. Both are excellent dancers whose choreographies explore their own life stories as well as social political, cultural and spiritual traditions. After the performance, at 8:30 pm, the artists will meet the audience at Pauza in Garden club. Before the show, at 5 pm, there will a screening of Susanne Linke’s other pieces.
The motto of the 3rd edition of KRoki is “Beauty Lost?” as the event aims to showcase group pieces by Europe’s most prominent choreographers who have the ability to thrill the audience through dance and movement.
From the curators:
Cosmetic surgery, perfect bodies of fashion models, Photoshop-treated faces on the cover pages of magazines ? so the festival of youth and perfection goes on. In the era of terrorizing beauty, very superficially understood, art has dug in on the opposite extreme. No less in contemporary dance, the notion of beauty has been debased, so it has lost its value and topicality. It has become somehow out of fashion and apparently trivial. This situation has strengthened the conceptual turn in dance that has strayed from classical aesthetics which has ceased to be a creative category in this area, to the benefit of the mechanical and physical exploration of the body. But the need for beauty is still inherent to the human nature. It is an expression of man?s innate longing for Paradise lost, the state of perfection. The memory of having experienced perfect harmony, the need to commune with the truth and the good are inherent to human mind and body, even if they have been relegated to the deepest layers of the mind.
Thus what else than art, and first of all dance, having access to the archetypical substance of the body, should create a space for the contact with evasive, true beauty? Doesn?t contemporary dance, breaking away of the canons of classical ballet and abounding with the richness of styles and techniques, have instruments to seduce and captivate the spectator with its world? Paradise Lost is the title of the premiere staged by the dancer and choreographer Samir Calixto. Here John Milton?s poem is a starting point for reflection on the identity of beauty and why it is rejected. The title and the idea of the performance has been a direct inspiration for the theme and the motto of the third edition of KRoki Contemporary Dance Festival. We want to show that contemporary dance has not exclusively banished aesthetic experience, but might as well be a way back to beauty.
Mistral
Dance and choreography: Susanne Linke and Koffi Kôkô
Concept: Johannes Odenthal
Stage design: Marcel Kaskeline
Lighting: Lutz Deppe ; lighting assistant: Tomek Ness
Sound design/sound engineer and music coordinator: Wolfgang Bley-Borkowski
Percussionists live recording AdK: Achille Acakpo,Moussa Coulibaly, Janos Crecelius
Dramaturgy support:: Waltraut Körver
Choreography support: Urs Dietrich
Production management: Christiane Uekermann
Coordinators: Kerstin Diekmann, Inge Zysk
Production: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and Susanne Linke
Supported by: Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin
After the show, at 8:30 pm, the artists will meet the audience in the club Pauza in Garden.
Tickets:
Package: PLN 235; concessionary: PLN 165
Tickets to Kafka sulla spiaggia, Mistral, Tyran(s), What the body does not remember? ? PLN 45; concessionary: PLN 35
Tickets to Eyes in the colours of the rain, Paradise Lost, Stalking Paradise ? PLN 35; concessionary: PLN 25
Admission to screenings, debates, dance workshops for kids, and meetings with artists ? free.
Online sales: www.mos.art.pl
Bookings: tel. +48 12 424 45 25, +48 12 424 45 28
Festival organisers: Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków ? Małopolski Ogród Sztuki
The Festival is supported by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.
